


Auto-Correct

by TheSaddleman



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Memories, letter writing, post-Series 9, slight angst, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-10-06
Packaged: 2019-01-09 16:57:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12280671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSaddleman/pseuds/TheSaddleman
Summary: The Doctor is annoyed that the application he uses for email keeps auto-correcting names. Type "Martha Jones", it changes to "Clara Oswald". "Jo Jones" becomes "Clara Oswald". So who is this Clara Oswald anyway?





	Auto-Correct

**To:** The Megasoft Company, Planet Earth

 **Date:** Whatever it says on your calendar 

**To whom it may concern:**

I wish to register a complaint. I recently installed your electronic communications application, _Lookout_ , on my computer. (You probably want to know the brand and model: TARDIS TT40. Just call it an import.) I wish to report an ongoing issue with its e-mail functionality.

I have friends throughout the ~~cosmos~~ world, and I installed this application so that I could communicate with them more readily. Plus, several of them wish to share files called “animated gifs,” and _Lookout_ is best suited for handling such files, even though ani-gifs appear to exist for the sole purpose of preserving amusing (to ~~humans~~ other people) images of cats. 

Anyway, it is difficult to communicate with my associates when the application in question insists on _changing their names_ as I type. I believe this functionality is known as “auto-correct.”

For example, I have a friend named Martha Jones. Whenever I type her name, the application insists on changing “Martha Jones” to “Clara Oswald.”

This has happened multiple times, with the names always changing to “Clara Oswald.”

Jo Jones—Clara Oswald; Sarah Jane Smith—Clara Oswald; Jack Harkness—Clara Oswald (that one I actually sent by mistake before I noticed the change. Fortunately, Jack has a good sense of humour about such things although, ever since it happened, he’s been signing his e-mails “Love, Clara.” The joke was funny the first five times). 

_Who is Clara Oswald?_ I have no idea who this person is. I can only assume she’s an employee of your company, perhaps someone in your coding team, who hid her name in the bowels of _Lookout_ for the sole purpose of annoying random customers. I say random because none of my acquaintances who use _Lookout_ report the same issue.

Up to this point I might have dismissed this as a “bug in the system,” or as I say, a joke of some kind. But of late this auto-correct business has taken a bizarre turn as the substitutions have started to do more than just involve names. This morning, I nearly sent an e-mail to Ian Chesterton, distinguished chairman emeritus of Coal Hill Academy in London, and I noticed—fortunately _before_ clicking “send” this time—that a reference to my granddaughter had been replaced with the statement, “Clara Oswald loves you.” Then I attempted to send a letter to a friend at an organisation I am not at liberty to name, and right in the middle of the message a sentence about, uh, recent events (OK, that pyramids nonsense) was replaced by, “Clara Oswald misses you.”

Once again, I stress that _I do not know who this Clara Oswald is_ , and I would appreciate either a refund or a patch to remove this glitch. Clearly, this Clara person is trying to send a message to somebody, and I do hope she finds what/who she’s looking for if she’s desperate enough to encode her desires within an app. 

In fact, now that I think about it, I have certain skill sets that might come in useful if she is indeed trying to contact somebody. So please do feel free to forward my contact information to her; I specialize in helping people, so maybe I can point her in the right direction, just so she can leave me in peace (see attached microdot: you do still use microdots, yes? Or was that the 1970s?). She doesn’t have to literally leave me in peace. If she needs somebody to talk to, I’m as good as anyone. Don’t let the eyebrows and standing-up catnaps fool you; I really am a good listener.

In fact, please disregard my complaint. Just ask this Clara Oswald person to get in touch and we’re square. The Secretary General of the United Nations can vouch for my good character. No wait, he’s dead. Try Brian Williams of London. He’s my grandfather-in-law. I think he either runs a detective agency or entered the priesthood. Possibly both.

Anyway, thank you for your attention. I hope to hear from you, or from “Clara Oswald,” in the very near future. Or past. 

Temporally yours,

_Doctor John Basil Smith_

PS. HERE’S THE MICRODOT ---> *****

***

The chairwoman of Megasoft sat back in her chair and sighed as she finished reading the letter from “Doctor Smith” for the third time.

She’d never expected the Doctor to write an old-fashioned letter, bless him. But she supposed that made her job a lot easier. She was concerned, however, that he apparently had lost all his memories by this point in his life. How long had it been, anyway? Was he even the same man?

She shrugged off the thought. She’d been trying to contact him for years, but knew she had to be careful. They’d already taken a hell of a risk in Nevada; if the Time Lords had detected the reunion, they would have come in force, primarily to punish the Doctor for breaking most of the laws of time, never mind committing an act of incarnicide on the General. She knew that could never be allowed to happen. Contacting the Doctor and arranging a rendezvous needed finesse. And while it wasn’t a “trap” in the traditional sense of the word (given the lack if ill-intent), the Doctor had still fallen into it perfectly.

The chairwoman of Megasoft had spent the last forty years building up her company, improving the world as best she could. In the millennia—aeons, really—since she’d been reborn thanks to the Doctor, she had lived many lives. This latest one, while a bit dull, had been useful and had served the purpose of allowing her to keep tabs on the Doctor, biding her time until the right moment. Everything else had been a diversion, although it felt satisfying to help so many people with the money she’d made. Always make amends, she had once heard the Doctor say.

Fortunately, in this age of Botox and people changing careers every seven years, the fact the chairwoman of Megasoft still retained her youthful beauty forty years on had raised barely an eyebrow. She’d considered at one point “killing off” her older self and continuing on as her own conveniently-identical daughter, newly back from some remote and secluded private school. But, as the age of Internet attention spans dawned, she found she, to use the current vernacular, “couldn’t be arsed.” Her only concern was avoiding her younger self and causing a paradox; fortunately, she knew where to avoid, even if it did result in a number of news websites in recent years speculating as to why she never went to London.

Of course, the Doctor had been right; programming the name, and the message, into his copy of the e-mail application was meant to get his attention. And even though he didn’t do what was expected—come and pay a visit in person—he’d done the next best thing. He had extended an invitation. And in some ways that was probably better than ambushing him in an unfamiliar place.

Now the trick was pulling off another reunion without the Time Lords finding out. 

The chairwoman unlocked a special drawer in her desk and withdrew a mobile that looked like it had been made in 2015 (because it had been) while also looking like it was thousands of years old (because it was). She laughed again at the irony that a piece of tech made by a competitor would end up surviving virtually forever. Even the battery still worked, though that was more down to the Doctor giving it infinite juice after it was purchased. She called up a photo gallery and found a selfie taken so long ago. A child. A teacher. And an observer, sending a message to the Doctor, just by being there.

Part of her still wished the Doctor had never gotten that message.

She chose a stored number and waited for the call to be answered.

“It’s me,” she said. “Well, we finally got his attention, and piqued his curiosity. He wants to be helpful, which is going to get him killed someday…”

She frowned as she listened.

“I agree. Hopefully he won’t get killed yet. That would be unfortunate. Anyway, he sent us contact details and as soon as my IT people figure out how to read a microdot, I’ll share the details with you.”

She paused until the laughter at the other end of the line calmed down and the other person spoke.

“Yeah, a microdot is so like the Doctor. So … are we ready to do this? It’s been so long. And I don’t know how he’ll react. Or if he’ll react. He seems to have forgotten everything. The neuroblock must have kept erasing-” 

She was interrupted and listened patiently for a while.

“OK, I agree. I won’t think that way. Positive thoughts, right. Though I wasn’t the one who was swearing on a stack of diaries a few years ago that this idea had no hope in hell of working.”

Another pause.

“Oh, I’ve been busy. I started a foundation to preserve one of the largest dark-sky sites on the planet last week. And I figured I’d have some fun and give SpaceX a boost, too. Maybe get them into the space passenger business a few years earlier than scheduled. You?”

The chairwoman listened.

“They can’t arrest you if they don’t have interdimensional travel yet. Don’t worry about it. So, about the Doctor…”

A pause.

“I’m sure everything will be fine. That was just my immortal pessimism coming to the front. Anyway, I think everything will work out fine, even though I’m still not sure what you hope to accompl-”. 

A pause.

“I know you have to at least try. I know you feel a thousand years is long enough. But are you sure you’ll be able to reach him through the neuroblock? You don’t even know if he’s regenerated…”

A middle-aged assistant knocked on the office door. “Five-minute warning, Madame Chairwoman,” he said, feeling a little weird using the old-fashioned title, but she’d insisted.

Madame Chairwoman nodded. “I’m afraid I have to ring off. I have a shareholder’s meeting to get to. I’ll be in touch once the microdot is decoded. Be well, Clara.” 

She shut down the mobile and returned it to its secure place. She picked up the Doctor’s letter and glanced at it one last time before heading to her meeting.

“Oh Doctor,” Ashildr said. “Are you in for a surprise.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by something that actually happened to me. While writing a recent email to a friend about the character Alara Kitan from The Orville, Outlook's auto-correct insisted on changing the name to "Clara". (In fact, as I was typing this note, AO3's own auto-correct did the same thing!)


End file.
